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UP IN MICHIGAN

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November 24, 1985, Page 010014Buy Reprints The New York Times Archives

A neighbor was driving the newlyweds through northern Michigan to the train station. The car crested a hill, and suddenly Little Traverse Bay spread out below them, wide and blue and shining. ''See all that,'' Ernest Hemingway told his bride. ''Talk about the beauty of the Bay of Naples! I've seen them both, and no place is more beautiful than Little Traverse in its autumn colors.''

The year was 1921. But Hemingway fans still find almost magical beauty in the places that shaped his imagination when he was young, whether they go there when there are boaters on the bay or skiers on the trails.

The Traverse Bay area of northern Michigan, about four hours from Detroit by car and less than 100 miles from the Canadian border at Sault Ste. Marie, still has a few streams where you can catch salmon with your hands if you wear your waders. Or you can sip coffee at a general store that he mentioned in a short story called ''Up in Michigan.'' You can walk down a road that was steep and sandy when Hemingway was young, and that still has no name. You can sit on the dock where, in the story, the blacksmith Jim Gilmore seduces the waitress Liz Coates. Or you can walk to the spot a few yards away where, in real life, Hemingway was married for the first time. And you can canoe the Big Two-Hearted River, though Hemingway never did.

Hemingway's family traveled to northern Michigan every summer, and most vacationers still do, but some go there as part of a fall camping trip or a winter skiing expedition. Or they stop on the way to the Mackinac Bridge and the far north. They dip a hand in Walloon Lake, which Hemingway's father liked for its pike, perch and large-mouth bass. They find the road sign that says Horton Bay, which Hemingway misspelled in his stories. And they hike through deep forests of pine, fir and beech, perhaps following the trails that blistered and bloodied his feet when he was 7 years old.

Later in life Hemingway wanted people to think that his place was at bullfights in Spain, at cafes in Paris or on safaris in Africa. But he never really erased the map of northern Michigan from his mind. As he saw it, northern Michigan was a rough world of old loggers' camps and Indians, fishing and hunting, and freight trains rumbling distantly through the night. It is the world of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, a place his sister Madelaine once said was so isolated that when you arrived, the waves were the loudest thing you heard.

Hemingway's short stories made the area well known, but what makes it memorable for many vacationers is its solitude. Hemingway would pack up his gear and hike off by himself through the open country between Little Traverse Bay and Indian River, stooping for low branches, shooting partridge and frying trout with bacon and cornmeal. On the lakes where Hemingway fished and sailed -Charlevoix and the smaller Walloon - the waves still sound loud. But other things are different. The lumber camps that were dying in his day are all gone now. The big, steady steamers no longer crisscross the Great Lakes. One wonders what he would make of a new condominium development that has been named after him, or the Hemingway T-shirts sold in Horton Bay.

The first time he went to northern Michigan, in 1900, he was less than a year old. ''As soon as it was safe for the boy to travel, they bore him away to the northern woods,'' Carlos Baker wrote in his biography of Hemingway. Henry Ford had just invented the assembly line when Hemingway first saw these woods, so close to the factories of Detroit and the stockyards of Chicago. Year after year until he was in his teens, he and his parents made the trip from their year-round home in suburban Chicago, going by steamer to Harbor Springs on Little Traverse Bay, by train along winding tracks to Petoskey and by rowboat to the family's hand-built cottage on Walloon Lake.

Canoeists may want to head farther north to the Big Two-Hearted River, which is near Seney on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. But Hemingway scholars say he never fished that river; some say he fished the Fox but named the story after the Two-Hearted because that made for a catchier title.

In the places Hemingway loved, Hemingway is loved and hated. In Horton Bay, less than 40 minutes from Petoskey via the two-lane Horton Bay Road that intersects U.S. 31, people will tell you that they have not read a word of what he wrote about the town. Others agree with his mother, who once said he was ''bastardizing a laudable art.'' One of his sisters called ''Up in Michigan'' a ''vulgar, sordid tale'' and said that reading it made her stomach turn. ''Everyone here knew Ernest Hemingway would never amount to a thing,'' said H. G. Harris of Horton Bay, who went fishing with him. ''He showed no sense of responsibility. He spent all his time fishing or hunting. Nobody believed it when he turned out the way he did.''

Nobody believed what he turned out, either. In ''The Torrents of Spring,'' his characters wander the streets of Petoskey, thinking suicidal thoughts and following a squaw who wears only moccasins. Waitresses in wayside restaurants quote Henry James or H. L. Mencken, and blue collar poets dream of Paris. He wrote it, he once said, ''to cool out'' after finishing the first draft of ''The Sun Also Rises.''

Although Hemingway wrote ''Torrents'' in Paris, Petoskey is also a good place to cool out. There are marinas and waterfront parks, and the comfortable, white-columned Perry-Davis Hotel overlooks the bay. Petoskey's fashionable shopping district has long been known for its clothing stores, which bring the latest styles to vacationing Chicagoans or Detroiters. These days there is a Pappagallo shop on Howard Street.

During 1919, Hemingway lived in a rooming house at 602 State Street. He paid $8 a week for a room with a big window that looked out toward the Bear River. Sometimes Hemingway ate at Jesperson's, at 312 East Howard Street. It is open for breakfast and lunch from 8 A.M. to 4 P.M., but don't confuse it with Brown's Beanery, which existed only in Hemingway's imagination and in ''The Torrents of Spring.'' There was a restaurant called Braun's, where beans were a specialty, and he may have been lampooning it in ''Torrents.'' Across the street from Jesperson's, at No. 309, is the building that housed the barber shop in ''Torrents.'' Appropriately enough for Hemingway fans, it is now a sporting goods shop and sells fishing gear. In the basement is an old steam bath that the current occupants say was an oasis for drifters who traveled the rails in Hemingway's time.

Petoskey has two old railroad stations, and Hemingway began his first honeymoon trip at the one on Water Street. It is now the Little Traverse History Museum, open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, or by appointment; call 616-347-2620.

Other than ''Torrents,'' Hemingway's Michigan stories are about growing up and doing things that he had done - chopping wood, hunting, shooting, fishing. Nick Adams may have been a fictional character, but Mr. Harris says the young writer had as much bravado as young Nick. He remembers walking with Hemingway and seeing a snake struggling to swallow a frog. ''He shot the snake's head off and away the frog went,'' Mr. Harris said. Horton Bay, as Hemingway described it in ''Up in Michigan,'' wasn't much of a town, ''only five houses on the main road between Boyne City and Charlevoix'' with an empty Methodist church, a prosperous blacksmith shop and a proper grammar school. There was also a white building with a general store and post office and, according to the story, ''maybe a wagon hitched out in front.''

The hitching post is gone, but the 109-year-old general store is still Horton Bay's main landmark (open from 9 A.M. daily). It is also one of the few places in the area that sells Hemingway merchandise. A T-shirt with his picture costs $12.95.

Ray and Jan Eggers bought the store three years ago and added pizza to the menu of sandwiches. Other than that, it is more or less the same as when Hemingway would have had coffee at the counter. The Eggers still sell fishhooks and hardware. They hang coffee mugs on the back wall for regular customers. And if the Eggers are busy and someone goes behind the counter to pour his own cup of coffee, they do not mind.

''This is not a Hemingway historical marker,'' Mrs. Eggers said. ''But you wouldn't believe how many people come here asking questions.''

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To a reader with an eye for detail, one question that immediately comes to mind is whether the town's name is Horton Bay, as the maps say, or Hortons Bay or Horton's Bay, as Hemingway spelled it. The answer is Horton Bay, and local fishermen say it is still a pretty good place to set out a line. ''Anybody could be a good fisherman in this lake,'' said William Oleh, a retired Chicago advertising executive who is Horton Bay's unofficial historian. ''All you've got to do is fish a lot, so Ernest Hemingway qualified. You swim out with the bait, drop it where you want it and then have a good time. It's pretty easy.''

Hemingway's description of a ''swampy meadow by the shore of the bay'' remains accurate, though the H-shaped dock of Hemingway's youth has disappeared. Its rickety replacement is a short trip across the shallow water to the point where he liked to pitch his tent. Hemingway could fish all night and catch a rainbow trout by morning.

When he was not camped out, the chances were that he was killing time at Mrs. Elizabeth Dilworth's, a restaurant on the road to the dock. It is now a private home called Shangri-La. Mrs. Dilworth was known as Auntie Beth, and her specialty was fried chicken. Mr. Oleh remembers that Hemingway ''always had a pencil and notebook in hand, sitting on the porch there; he was always writing.''

Hemingway's family lived a few miles away, in a cottage his father had built for $400. It was on a lake that was called Bear Lake when Hemingway was an infant, but the name was changed to Walloon Lake about 1915 after Hemingway's mother wrote a song that began, ''O lovely Walloona, fairest of all the inland seas.'' One of Hemingway's sisters lives in the cottage; it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places but is not open to visitors.

Still, readers know the family's beach from ''The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife,'' a story that Hemingway once said was about the time that he decided his father was a coward. Hemingway borrowed some other details from real life as well - the names of the Indians were the names of friends with whom he hunted, and there was an Ojibway Indian camp half a mile from the Hemingway home.

If Hemingway's days in northern Michigan taught him that there was a certain code for Indians, loggers and what he considered real men, he also understood that the day of the logging camp was over. In ''The End of Something,'' he wrote that there were no more logs to make lumber, so the schooners began ferrying the machinery from the lumber mill out to the bay. ''Its open hold covered with canvas and lashed tight, the sails of the schooner filled and it moved out into the open lake, carrying with it everything that had made the mill a mill and Hortons Bay a town.''

Hemingway did not come back to northern Michigan for almost 30 years. Passing through Petoskey in the late 1940's, Hemingway said he could never live in Michigan again because it had become too civilized for him. Someone asked why he hadn't come back sooner.

''I've always been disappointed in places where I've returned,'' he said. ''I have such loving memories of northern Michigan that I didn't want them interrupted.''

A VISTOR'S GUIDE TO THE NORTHERN WOODS AND WATERS Getting There Michigan's Hemingway country is 250 miles north of Detroit, between Petoskey and Traverse City. This is the world of some of his earliest fiction, including the Nick Adams stories, and several later ones - ''The Battler,'' ''Ten Indians'' and ''The Light of the World.''

By car from Detroit, take I-75, turning west at the M-32 exit and heading north on U.S. 131. By air, Republic Express Airlines offers round trip commuter flights from Detroit to Traverse City for approximately $200. You can rent a car and drive north on U.S. 31 to Petoskey. Or, for an additional $30, you can fly Republic Express to Pellston, take U.S. 31 south to Petoskey and then U.S. 131 toward Charlevoix. On this route you will drive through Walloon Lake, where Hemingway's family had a summer home.

Horton Bay, less than 40 minutes from Petoskey, was the setting for Hemingway's ''Up in Michigan.'' From Petoskey, take U.S. 31 south to the Horton Bay Road, turn left and drive to the end. Lodging and Dining Petoskey, a resort town that was the backdrop for Hemingway's satirical ''The Torrents of Spring,'' is a good place to spend a night. The best known hotel is the white-columned Perry-Davis (616-347-2516), which charges $58 for a single room overlooking Little Traverse Bay, $70 for a double, at this time of year.

Stafford's Bay View Inn (616-347-2771) charges $78 for a room, and the Petoskey Holiday Inn (616-347-6041) charges $39 for a single room and $49 for a double.

If you combine a Hemingway trip with a ski weekend, the Bartley House (616-526-2183), a 70-room hotel on the grounds of the nearby Boyne Highlands ski resort, offers a two-night weekend package from $119 a person. The price include lift tickets for the popular Boyne Highlands trails.

The 111-year-old Park Garden Cafe at 432 East Lake Street, Petoskey (open daily from 10:30 A.M.) has a long bar, and Hemingway's portrait hangs in the back room. Dinner costs $7 to $12 a person with wine. The Mitchell Street Pub, at 426 East Mitchell Street, has a popular bar and serves burgers, salads and light meals from 11:30 A.M. to 2 A.M.

If you forget your copy of Hemingway's short stories, try the Volume One bookstore at 325 East Lake Street (616-347-8148) or the Bus Stop Bookshop in the Greyhound bus station, a browser's delight on U.S. 31 (616-347-4400).J. B.